Poetry Prevails

Journalism may be dying, the publishing industry shrinking and our youth more familiar with iPods than iambic pentameter, but poetry is, according to the New York Times, strong and kicking.

Every other year the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival brings thousands of literature-lovers to Waterloo Village in New Jersey's Byram Township. The gathering, started in 1986 with an audience of 3,000, has grown to welcome over 19,000 attendees 20 years later. The most renowned poets attend, including Nobel laureates.

Almost 20,000 people, then, were disappointed when the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation announced the cancellation of the 2010 festival due to turmoil in the stock market. The foundation has lost around $100 million — a full one-third — of its assets. This was no time, the foundation authorities decided, to be mounting a festival that costs roughly $750,000 to run.

Poetry enthusiasts, however, would not hear of such a thing, and raised a ruckus so loud that the foundation relented and put the festival back on the calendar. The festival will relocate to a different New Jersey town and will probably be pared down from four days to three, but the muse will not be silenced.

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